We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, July 1, 2021

Posts that I especially recommend for Thursday, July 1, 2021

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, from the Stanford University School of Medicine recently shared that the survival rate for people under 70 years of age is about 99.95 percent. He also said that COVID is less dangerous than the flu for children. This comes based on approximately 50 studies that have been published, and information showing that more children in the U.S. have died from the flu than COVID. Here’s a meta analysis published by the WHO that gives this number. The number comes based on the idea that many more people than we have the capacity to test have most likely been infected.

How dangerous COVID is for healthy individuals has been a controversial discussion throughout this pandemic, with viewpoints differing.
The use of excess deaths can be illuminating because the data would ameliorate many issues with misclassifying Covid deaths. Covid-19 death counts are susceptible to under-or overcounting from misdiagnosis and errors in reporting. Furthermore, excess death data surmounts the reporting obstacle and simply accounts for the total number of deaths from all causes at a given place and time. We can therefore gauge the pandemic’s mortality impact by comparing 2020 excess deaths to a historical average of excess deaths under ‘normal’ conditions.

As an increasing amount of data has become available, better statistical examinations of the excess death data have become possible.
  • The war on reality (a common theme) by Alex Gutentag from The Wall Will Fall. (Note: This weblog is administered by Vanessa Beeley, a British journalist currently living in Syria.)
The transition from industrial capitalism to financial capitalism is now underway as described by Todhunter, with who I have had personal communication. He describes the history of this transition that is rooted in the Thatcher and Reagan administrations. It was impossible during the 1980s to have an audience for any kind of radical dissent. Using the current pandemic and the climate crisis, the new global financial elites openly aspire to own (and control) everything in the advanced capitalist countries. 
 
Now when it is becoming evident that only a small segment of the population (less than .0001) will have any benefit from this new economy, we see their attempts to crush growing widespread opposition. That is precisely why we are seeing increasing attempts to silence these voices in privately-owned social media corporations and the internet, and turn such dissenters into domestic violent extremists (DVE) and target them. I see signs of our ruling masters taking their gloves off and turning to overt fascist methods which we first witnessed in the 1930s in Germany, Italy, and Japan.
 
This time the billionaire ruling classes in the de-facto capitalist empire (US/Anglo/Zionist Empire) are threatened by the rise of China and Russia and the increasing signs of climate destabilization. As a result, our masters are resorting to fantasies (the Great Reset) to ward of these nightmarish enemies. Because we have gone along with these classes for many decades without any meaningful opposition, I now believe it is too late to save us humans, and most other species, from the devastating effects of climate destabilization that we are now only starting to see.
There have been various estimates of just exactly how many elections the United States has interfered in since the Second World War, the numbers usually falling somewhere between 80 and 100, but that does not take into account the frequent interventions of various kinds that took place largely in Latin America between the Spanish-American War and 1946. One recalls how the most decorated Marine in the history of the Corps Major General Smedley Butler declared that “War is a racket” in 1935. He confessed to having “…helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. .... 
 
My reaction: I don't personally subscribe to the notion that Biden is senile. Currently, I think he only occasionally has lapses in thought processes. But this report is not about a lapse in thought process, but a deliberate attempt to reinforce a propaganda theme that Russia is responsible for any wrongdoing in the world which is an attempt to project onto Russia what the US ruling class has been doing all along.
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